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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25152454">Ascendance</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/glyphsinateacup/pseuds/glyphsinateacup'>glyphsinateacup</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Gideon Nav gets to live, Loss of Limbs, Lyctors have wings, Necromancy, Wing Acquisition Is Treated As Body Horror, Winged!Harrowhark Nonagesimus</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 03:40:37</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,007</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25152454</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/glyphsinateacup/pseuds/glyphsinateacup</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Before the day she built her own, Harrow could have counted on one hand the number of times she had seen a pair of wings.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Wingfic Exchange June 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Ascendance</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/inquisitor_tohru/gifts">inquisitor_tohru</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Rating is for body horror and canon-typical violence</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Before the day she built her own, Harrow could have counted on one hand the number of times she had seen a pair of wings.</p><p>Portraits of the Emperor didn’t count. In any aspect, she had always thought those to be more metaphorical than real, gilded feathers arranged in ranks around the Lord Undying like his soldiers or penitents. As abstract as the tiles of a mosaic, as numerous, and as unchanging.</p><p>She could think back to illustrations in books, of birds, of insects; but in the sort of books she looked to for instruction, those were more often arranged for their anatomy, flayed open to the bone or chitin scaffold, one single decaying plate depicting their fully constructed wings. History, not practice, because no beings inhabited the Ninth House but humans and human skeletons.</p><p>These flat representations were eclipsed totally by the memory of The Body, arranged on the bower of her wings behind the barriers of the tomb, flashed on the inside of Harrow’s eyelids, unforgettable. The Body’s wings were ice, and stone, sharp and pricking in their stillness. Harrow had been gripped with longing then, for a single feather that she might walk back into the world with, but hadn’t dared to brush a finger along them. Though their edges might have burnt or slit her skin, that fear wasn’t what stopped her from touching; that reason she had never been able to give words.</p><p>Ianthe’s and Cytherea’s wings, revealed in battle, hadn’t given her the luxury of much observation yet. Ianthe’s wings, like everything else about her, spoke of disease – molting, stolen, slick. Limply angled at her back as she stood, laughing, and as she fought, bone-crushing quick. At Harrow’s last glance of them, they were spread on the ground, crushed under Cytherea’s feet. And Cytherea’s, regrown from her back blisteringly fast at the drop of her disguise, were dangerous to linger staring at, but feathers of every color, every shape, had been dusting Harrow, and Camilla and Gideon, as they struggled for their lives.</p><p>The barrier keeping Cytherea off was using the last of Harrow’s strength, the final reserves of regenerating bone. She’d reached the brink, when Gideon turned from her limping pace and grasped her shoulders, bleeding all over her, which was just like Nav. “I have an idea. It’s going to save us. I’m going to save us. But you’re going to hate it.”</p><p>“What are you going on about?”</p><p>“Take my arm. It’s useless at this point anyway.” Gideon gestured, spurting more blood, almost gleeful. “Crush up those bones, make some wings and fly, mini-Lyctor.”</p><p>“It’s not just about the wings! If you’re still alive-”</p><p>“Anything else you want to try?”</p><p>Harrow could have argued, but when she opened her mouth, the words were no longer familiar. The feral urge to rip into Gideon for the sins of the world, the kind of argument that they had built a lifetime out of, it had deserted her for this new, unknowable landscape. She inhaled, coughed blood from her throat, flicked Gideon in the chest and croaked. “One flesh, one end, Nav.”</p><p>“How about <em>no end</em>,” Gideon answered, grinning fiercely. Once they decided, it was quick. They clasped hands. Camilla brought the sword down.</p><p>The contact high of Gideon’s spent adrenaline was the first fuel. The flesh was distasteful, Harrow thought distantly, disconnected. But the bones of Gideon’s arm – the microscopic fibers of them, the hollows and the channels, the splintered ends and spurting of thanergic and thalergic energies - bones she understood. She dove her attention deep so as not to hear the noise coming from Gideon - alive now, Camilla staunching the bleeding, but not for long unless Harrow could take this sacrifice and turn it into something utterly impossible.</p><p>What was the heir of the Ninth House but the sculptor of bones?</p><p>Isolate the bones. Crack them, grind them, migrate them as splinters through her skin, through her blood and fat, changing them – linking soul to soul while it still lived in Gideon’s own body, pulling greedily, sucking molten thanergy and thalergy together through her sternum to her shoulders her back - a ripping, a tearing, trying to work out the damn structure of the things on the fly.</p><p>What were wings but limbs? She knew limbs backwards and forwards.</p><p>There is no blueprint in a human body for feathers but there are shapes that reach and spread. Fingers reach; she incorporated their clicking joints into a span. Ribs spread, reluctantly; she arched open a new set of them mirrored to her own for anchors and for scaffolding. All the lightest driest bone she had ever knit into existence, all balking physics and soaked in blood and shaking with effort.</p><p>Her breaths were bigger then, as her lungs were pulled back and open by the rustling, calcifying weight on her back, a reach beyond the previous possibility. She had become large, and stirring with energy - splinters in the muscles of her shoulders and arms, her grafting rough and destructive, unpracticed, growth controlled but still far too fast. She fell to her knees; cracked stone pavement ground into her skin. Her grasping fingers found the hilt of Gideon’s dropped sword.</p><p>As Cytherea’s monster smashed through their shelter, Harrow wrenched herself to her feet and the grasping, hissing bone wings at her back flared into the face of the hulking  beast. Shining white and red and massive, wider and taller and deeper than her body, Harrow’s wings were enough to make it rear back, for the moment. As she pursued it, her feet left the ground, impossibly. She supported herself in the air, strange buoyancy running through her whole body and anchored at her spine.</p><p>In the very small part of her mind that wasn’t experiencing flight, Harrow could feel a link back to the mechanical processes of Gideon’s body; bleeding and experiencing shock, but still living. Good. If Gideon died - Harrow refused categorically to think of Gideon dying. And in that moment, Harrow had her hands full with the business of ascension.</p>
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